


Love and Pfriendship

by VanaTuivana



Category: Psmith - P. G. Wodehouse
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 19:41:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VanaTuivana/pseuds/VanaTuivana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Modern-day college AU.  Mike Jackson's freshman year at Sedleigh State proves to be an quite an education under the tutelage of his eccentric new roommate, Rupert Smith.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love and Pfriendship

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mayhap](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayhap/gifts).



Sedleigh State wasn't exactly the college of Mike Jackson's dreams. Granted, it wasn't the college of his nightmares either, mostly because he'd never even considered it possible that _he_ might wind up at a Division II school. He didn't like to brag even to himself, but when the recruiters from Georgia Tech and Arizona State had sat in a guy's living room and complimented his mom's cooking and talked to him earnestly about redshirting, well...

Mike got all depressed when he thought about that kind of stuff. So he didn't, or tried not to. Anyway, Sedleigh was just for the year, until he got his grades up enough to transfer somewhere with an actual baseball team. That was the deal.

He found his dorm room easily enough on move-in day. Outwood Hall (built in 1983 and featuring riotproof doors, as his orientation booklet cheerily informed him, and windows that didn't open from the inside, as he learned from personal experience some time later) was the only freshman dorm on campus, and it was the one with the steady stream of hovering parents and nervous teenagers marching like ants up the chipping stone steps and through the heavy doors. Some of the other freshmen even looked excited, but Mike had perfected the art of stolid apathy and he was sticking to it. It was one small mercy that his parents had dropped him off with his stuff at the curb and left him to move in alone. One more minute of his mom's hovering and he was going to have to punch somebody.

He banged into room 129 unannounced, without considering that his brand-new roommate might be there already.

Also, without considering that his brand-new roommate might be naked.

Okay, so he wasn't _naked_ naked. There was a towel strategically wrapped, and that and the dripping hair clued him in that the guy had just got out of the shower. (Showering in the middle of the afternoon? On move-in day, with parents wandering around all over the place? Who _did_ that? Mike's roommate, apparently.)

"Uh, hey," Mike said, valiantly playing nonchalant and resting his eyes on the wall, which he noted absently was already half-covered with posters. "Sorry to barge in. Didn't realize you were here already. So, I guess you're... Rupert?" He'd thought it was an awful name upon reading it on his assignment sheet, and it was even worse said out loud. The guy's parents obviously hated their kid or something.

The other guy winced, like the name caused him actual pain. "Smith," he corrected firmly. "I would _prefer_ that the R-word never again be mentioned in my hearing. Alas, that the sins of the father should be visited thus upon the son. But we must endure, my dear fellow, we must _somehow_ endure." He rose elegantly to his feet, managing by some thankful miracle not to knock the towel out of alignment, and extended one slim hand in Mike's direction. "You, one presumes, are Michael Jackson, though of no relation to a certain dearly departed musician after whom you were (no doubt unintentionally) christened. Upon first reading your name, I said to myself: 'Smith, here at last is a kindred spirit. Here is a man who knows the pain of a name bestowed with malice aforethought. For the love of heaven, Smith, make a friend of this jewel in the rough.' For your own sake, comrade, I _do_ hope they call you Mike."

"Yeah," Mike answered, slightly bemused, and dropped the bag of clothes at his feet so he could shake Smith's hand. "Looks like you already staked out the bed by the window, so this one's mine?"

"If you would prefer to call the sunnier berth your own," Smith offered courteously, "you need only drop the merest of hints, and I shall relinquish my prior claim with merry heart. For I know already that we shall be as brothers, Comrade Jackson, sharing all that is our own. _Mi casa es_ , in very literal fact, _su casa._ And other dignified expressions of similar welcoming nature."

"Right," said Mike, who had been lost halfway through (Spanish wasn't his strong point), and extricated his hand from Smith's. The guy was not only a talker but also kind of camp, and maybe that was catching. He didn't want to risk it. "The other bed's fine. Uh, the rest of my stuff's still downstairs. I'm going to get it now so you can, you know, change."

And he left before Smith could say anything else, because _that_ hadn't been the most bewildering conversation ever or anything. This year was going to be... weird.

***

As it turned out, weird wasn't the half of it. By mid-morning on the second day of classes, Smith had apparently changed his name to Psmith. ("With a silent P," he had explained to Mike over lunch that day, "as in _Ptolemy_ , _psittacism_ , and _pneogaster_. See also _gnome_ , _gnash_ , and _phlegm_." Mike had just nodded and concentrated on picking the mushroom bits off his slice of pizza.) By the end of the first week, he'd also apparently changed his entire wardrobe over and made friends with most of the girls on their floor and enemies with most of the boys, with the notable exception of a round-faced frosh named Tom who usually smelled slightly of pot and did a lot of giggling over nothing in particular.

Meanwhile, Mike managed to attend every single class session in his first week _and_ do all of the assigned reading, even the deadly boring stuff for the art history class he'd mistakenly thought might be fun. He also spent a lot of time in the batting cages at the campus athletic center, knocking the machine's pitches out of the figurative park while stewing over bad luck and scholarships and life in general.

Mike and Psmith were somehow friends, though, and that made life at college a little bit more bearable. They were in the required freshman rhetoric class together, and three days into the semester Psmith had switched to the same economics section Mike was in, citing irreconcilable differences with the grad student who taught his former section. Mike thought it probably had something to do with Psmith's claim that he had recently become a socialist and disavowed the yoke of capitalist economies, but experience quickly taught him it was best not to bring that up because it tended to lead to lectures on the redistribution of wealth and Psmith singing the Internationale in the shower.

Not that Psmith had a bad voice -- it was nice, actually, a clear tenor and mostly in-tune, which was more than Mike could say about the showtunes his little sister Marjory tended to belt out in the shower back home -- and not that Mike really minded listening to him. It was just that, when you took into account that the guy, that added up to a _lot_ of stirring anti-capitalist verses stuck in Mike's head all day.

***

Mike had gotten the sneaking suspicion that his roommate was gay on that first day, especially when he'd inspected the room more thoroughly to find that the posters on the walls were mostly of nude statues missing their arms or heads and that Psmith's wardrobe was... unique. Not that there was anything wrong with having a waistcoat collection or an incredible number of top hats, or with wearing those paired with glitter T-shirts and skinny jeans. The guy even had a _monocle_ that he carried around in his pocket and used to peer closely at people in order to make them squirm. Plus, he was studying classics and Greek, and spoke fluent theatre.

Mike's sister Marjory was the unofficial den mother of the GSA at her high school and was always bringing home boys in skinny jeans and eye makeup. Mike definitely knew the signs.

Which was why it didn't actually surprise him, one Friday night, to come back to the dorm after dinner to find Psmith getting ready for a date.

"Oh, who with?" Mike asked supportively, thinking vague thoughts in the direction of Tom Jellicoe, the giggling boy down the hall. "Do I know him?"

"You know not _him_ , my dear man, for _he_ is, in fact, a _she_ ," Psmith replied absently, leaning into the bathroom mirror as he smoothed down his crisply-parted hair. "But issues of accuracy in the small matter of the gender of my cinematic companion this evening quite overlooked, yes, I believe your path just may have crossed hers upon occasion. I wonder, Comrade Jackson, if you would be so good as to hand me that lotion bottle by your left elbow?"

Mike was surprised enough to stare. "Yeah, okay," he said after a moment, and handed over the bottle. "So... you're _not_...?"

To which the only answer Psmith gave was an enigmatic smile.

***

The girl Psmith was dating turned out to be Eve Halliday from the floor above them, which actually kind of made sense to Mike when he thought about it. Eve was definitely a woman, but she had this slender flat-chested boyish look going on, complete with pageboy and untied scuffed-up sneakers. Eve was sharp-tongued and on the staff of the school paper and way smarter than Mike was, and when Psmith started spending his free time with her, Mike went to the athletic center and hit the batting cages with a vengeance.

It wasn't like he was jealous of Psmith spending more time with Eve. Not really. It was just that Mike had kind of gotten used to having his roommate around declaiming in Latin or making Mike lift and carry for him or holding entire conversations with himself.

The room was quiet when Psmith wasn't there, but at least Mike got a lot of homework done. By this rate, his grades would be good enough that he could transfer out of Sedleigh State to a different school, _any_ other school.

***

"Comrade Jackson," Psmith said one day, leaning over the back of Mike's desk chair and looking at him through that damn monocle in a way that always made Mike a little nervous, "I cannot help but feel that of late you and I have been acting, as the old song goes, like two ships that pass in the night, exchanging glances. Shall we put behind us our distant ways and clasp hands once again as friends and brothers? I have here," he added persuasively, pulling a mostly-full fifth of whiskey from behind his back, "a prime social accelerant which shall rekindle the flame of our younger and more intimate days. I suspect that you are wondering just how I, a flower of perfect innocence, came by such illicit goods. I fear that shall remain a mystery for the ages," Psmith said with a flourish of the bottle. "Now come and toast to life, to friendship, to our fast-fading youth. Do we have any foodstuffs of the nibblish sort, I wonder?"

They ended up on opposite ends of Psmith's bed, the bottle in between them, while Psmith talked about the excesses of ancient Rome and the horors of dorm food and the latest gossip from the theatre department and Mike interjected a comment or two when it seemed appropriate. It was almost just like those first few weeks settling into this strange sort of friendship, except. _Except._ There was something there now that both of them were stepping around, somehing that had to be settled between them.

"Smith," Mike said suddenly, when his roommate's flow of words had stopped for a moment. "I really did think you were gay. I mean. I thought it... made sense." He was flushed and warm with drink, leaning over the bottle in the middle of the bed.

"Did you think so?" Psmith replied with perfect equilibrium, and tilted his head at Mike. They were quiet for a long minute or two, Psmith's eyes locked on Mike's until he wanted to look away but couldn't, because... well, because.

He must have blinked first, because he didn't see Psmith coming. Mike found himself sprawled half on his back with the nearly-empty liquor bottle, and Psmith's mouth gentle and strangely cool on his own. He _tasted_ \-- Mike didn't even think about being weirded out by the idea of making out with his best friend before he licked into Psmith's mouth, chasing the taste of alcohol.

"Eve," he said a few moments later, or tried to. It was hard to say anything clearly when Psmith was sucking at his tongue like that. Mike pulled away to free his mouth and tried again. "What about Eve?"

"Oh," said Psmith, as faintly as Mike had ever heard him say anything, "she knows, of course."

That was the last time either of them tried talking for a while.

***

Mike thought even before he opened his eyes in the morning that everything was about to get fairly horrible. Not because of what he and Psmith had done -- that was okay, that was even kind of a relief, because at last he knew more or less where they stood now -- but because waking up was going to hurt. It was hard to be optimistic with a splitting headache and fuzzy mouth, even with the sort of nice feeling of Psmith's lanky body sprawled next to his and putting his left arm to sleep.

"Nghm," he said, and tugged at his arm until Psmith obligingly rolled over and freed him.

He managed to haul himself into the shower and rinse out his mouth and scrub the grit out of his eyes. By the time he came out, Psmith was awake and lounging on one elbow, looking more alert than he really had any right to, not with how much he'd drunk last night.

"Smith, d'you," said Mike, and then stopped to clear his throat. "Do you want to go out with me? And maybe try all that stuff again sometime without drinking so much first?"

Psmith smiled back at him, calm and serene and utterly unsurprised. "My dear, I would like that of all things," he pronounced, and rolled back over to make room for Mike to slide back into bed beside him.


End file.
